Fortra's JAMS Reviews

We use JAMS to run various tasks, such as nightly claims processing jobs. It's also helpful for moving files around and interfacing between the cloud and our on-prem systems. 

The company has 50 to 100 users, including admins, developers, and on-call maintenance staff. We also have reporting staff who monitor jobs to see if they are succeeding. 

JAMS enables us to formalize simple tasks, reducing the amount of manual work. We can package all the access needed for those tasks, so a non-expert can deal with a problem without disturbing people. It automated 100 percent of the functions that can be automated. It's the only scheduler we have. 

It's hard to quantify how much labor it replaced. It's more than 10 days annually but probably less than 100. It saves staff maybe a day every four weeks. JAMS has centralized management. It is a critical way we deal with multiple systems that interface.  

We have eliminated some tools. For example, we can use JAMS as a monitoring tool and use it in place of Enterprise Manager. Regarding time saved, JAMS saved about 15 to 20 percent compared to our previous scheduler. JAMS also costs less than our last system, significantly reducing operational overhead. 

JAMS handles complex schedules well enough. That's one of the main reasons we use it. We use JAMS to populate our data warehouse every night, ensuring the updated data is available every morning. Troubleshooting failed jobs in JAMS is straightforward. You can navigate the logs quickly, and it sends you an email pointing to the source of the problem. 

JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible. The interactive processes are helpful. We don't use them often, but it's a nice feature to have.

It sends notifications to the person on-call when a job fails, but the failures rarely have anything to do with JAMS. It allows jobs to restart several times, which often resolves exceptions. I'm satisfied with how it handles exceptions. 

JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today.

We have used JAMS since 2014.

The current version of JAMS is stable. It's more stable than the previous version.

I rate Fortra's customer service a nine out of ten. 

Positive

Deploying JAMS is straightforward. During the initial deployment and migration from the old system, we had to request servers and plan to deploy the client. There were three stages: installation, migrating jobs from our old system, and testing. 

The migration wasn't automatic. We had to reenter most of the jobs from the previous system manually. We took the opportunity to redesign the tasks a little. It wasn't that difficult, and we had no problems replicating the functionality or anything like that. The migration took about six months.

There isn't much maintenance after deployment. We can upgrade to the latest version in two or three hours. 

JAMS is cheaper than our previous solution, and we can run it on any server. The license for our old solution was limited to two servers. JAMS reduced our expenditures by about half compared to the other solution. 

JAMS is much cheaper than our previous solution.

I rate Fortra's JAMS an eight out of ten. 

It is our enterprise job scheduler. Every batch job that runs in the company runs on JAMS. 

It helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. It has full logging. You go into your single pane of glass, you see all your failed jobs, you click on the job, go straight to the log, and you see what has gone wrong. And if something fails in the middle of the night, with the targeted alerting it sends an email or an SMS and does all your on-call for you. We've been using it for so long that it's hard to say how much time it saves us. But it's probably fair to say it quite easily saved us a day a week, and even more. The time saved could easily be the equivalent of one FTE. And that, of course, allows that FTE to do other work that's beneficial to the company.

One of the most valuable features is the natural language selection. That means that when you are scheduling a job, you've got more flexibility than anything else I've ever come across in the industry. You can not only tell it to run something daily or on a specify a day of the week, but you can specify "the first Monday of the month," or "the second workday of the month," or "the second business day of the month," or "the last business day of the month," or "every other Tuesday." The flexibility in the scheduling is because of JAMS' natural language selection. It's better than anything else on the market that I've seen.

The ability to change jobs is the stock standard for a job scheduler, but JAMS has the ability to allocate resources. We mainly use that at a global level. If we are doing scheduled maintenance, for example, we can halt all jobs. We can set the resource level to zero and no jobs will run. That way, we don't have to go through turning off schedules. For maintenance windows, it makes life an absolute breeze.

The alerting in it is really targeted. You can set a hierarchy of jobs if you like. There is a global level, obviously. But underneath that, you can have folders. We set up those folders at a functional level within the business. For instance, we have a folder for our finance jobs, another for our compliance jobs, and another folder for our equities jobs. At that folder level, you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level.

Another great feature is the full auditing capability. If anyone makes a change to a job, you can see who's changed it and when. That full auditing capability is huge for compliance. And you've got version control, as well. If you make a change to a job and it fails, all you have to do is revert back to the previous version and you're back in business.

In addition, it's built on .NET. If you're a Microsoft shop, PowerShell is exposed natively and seamlessly integrates with it, which is brilliant. We use an awful lot of PowerShell in our organization because we're a Microsoft shop.

But it can run agents on any operating system and it can run all types of jobs. The execution methods it has are amazing. It can run stored procedures, SQL Agent jobs, SSIS packages, batch jobs, Linux jobs, and Oracle. The number of execution methods is huge and it runs just about any type of job you would want to run, and on any platform, which is also huge.

JAMS is also very intuitive and easy to use. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up and get started with it. It integrates natively with Windows Workflow Foundation, so you can build quite complex workflows, with if-then-else structures, and you can run things in parallel or in sequence. It really is a very feature-rich product but it's also very easy to use.

In addition, it helps centralize the management of all jobs and all your platforms and applications. You have a single pane of glass where you're looking at everything. If your organization is big, you might have multiple administrators. In that case, you set security at whatever level you like and certain people can only look at certain jobs. In my case, because I'm effectively the administrator of it in our organization, I see everything. But that one pane of glass for a whole organization is its great strength.

The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that.

I have been using JAMS since 2009. I was the first in the Australasian region to implement it. We're currently using version 6.5, but we're in the process of upgrading to 7.3.

The stability is really good. They do have a failover solution, which we're not using. We are just using the standalone, with a single server, but with no problems at all. We have never missed a beat.

We haven't had a problem scaling up. We have over 2,000 individual jobs, and we run 25,000 instances of those jobs every day. We plan to increase our usage as this is the only solution that runs jobs in our company.

All of IT uses it to schedule our jobs. And because of the security aspects, we make ad hoc jobs available to end-users as well. They can go in and all they're able to see, and run, only their ad hoc job. So about 50 out of the 350 people in our organization are using it.

The support is terrific. I've been working with these guys for 12 years and, as often as not, they've come across every problem that I've come across. I'll say, "Oh, listen, I've got this problem," and they'll say, "Here's a piece of code you can run. Here's an example where one of our other clients has done it before and we helped them do it." The support is brilliant; really good.

Positive

When I started with this company, they didn't have JAMS. Because I'd used it at a different company, the first thing I did when I got here was to say, "We're putting this in," and they did. They were running jobs via SQL Agent, as well as Windows Tasks Scheduler, SQL Server Reporting Services schedule, via Linux cron, and someone had even built an in-house job scheduler. Back then, when a job failed, remediating it was an absolute nightmare because nothing was synchronized. There were no dependencies on any of the jobs.

All the monitoring was done manually before, in our organization. Any company of a certain size should have an enterprise job scheduler. If you don't, you're just kidding yourself. You are making a rod for your own back, because someone has to monitor things, whether it's SQL Agent or Window Task Scheduler, to make sure the jobs are all working properly. Because it was manual, things would get missed and it was a nightmare.

The initial setup of JAMS was very straightforward. It was really good and their support staff was terrific in helping with that as well.

You get it up and running in a day, if you've got your servers built. It's a matter of provisioning a server, making sure you've got your service account set up, database ready to go or your database server provisioned. As long as you've got all the bits and pieces, you could be up and running in an hour, really.

ROI is hard to quantify. But whereas in the past we might have had one or more people monitoring batches and remediating failed batches, JAMS does all that now. It frees up one or two people. It's been an absolute no-brainer for us. It's worth its weight in gold and we cannot get rid of it now.

There was a price hike recently, which makes it a lot more expensive than what we are currently paying for it. You can do an enterprise license, which is probably the best value. But it's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price.

Before coming across JAMS, I had worked in bigger organizations that used Tivoli and Control-M. They are what I would call your "Tier One" solutions. Very big companies use them, although I don't know why they do, given that they're super expensive. Both of them are very feature-rich products, but in addition to being very expensive, they're very complex to set up. They also require a very heavy touch to maintain and administer. JAMS is easier to set up, much cheaper, and much easier to administer. 

There's another product called ActiveBatch, which is what I would call "Tier Two," because it's not as expensive as Tivoli and Control-M. ActiveBatch is in the same category as JAMS, price-wise. It has a nice drag-and-drop interface, which is something that JAMS doesn't have, but it's a lot more complex to use and not as intuitive.

Give it a go. Compare it to everything else on the market and, in terms of bang for your buck and the features you get, I would be very surprised if anything even comes close to JAMS.

You put an agent on every box that you want to run a job on. It's not agentless. But, as I said, you can put an agent on a Linux box or a Windows box or whatever other type of box you have and run jobs on any type of OS.

JAMS stays well ahead of the curve. I've been using it for 12 years and I still love it. I've recommended it at every company I've worked for.

Our primary use case is for batch automation. We don't use the RPA product. We use the scheduling agents that can run on other machines so that when the scheduler kicks off the job, it can run either on the main JAMS server or it can run on an agent box.

We do have some interactive jobs that interact with the desktop mainly in Excel, but that's not our preferred method. We want to be, as much as we can, a more structured batch. As far as interactive, we don't have folks that are interacting with the jobs. The jobs are built to run standalone. They may interact with the desktop or with the computer itself to run the job, but the users interact directly with the jobs.

JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.

Over the past few years, JAMS has saved them at least 20% of their time. At least.

Its ability to centralize the management of jobs on all of our platforms and applications is a huge advantage. Before we used JAMS, there were pockets of what I would call semi-automation in different places and it was somewhat restricted and not very flexible. We were able to really combine a lot of the automations that were being done throughout the company, add a whole lot more, and all monitor it from the central JAMS console.

JAMS has helped eliminate monitoring tools. We do have some JAMS-related monitoring that goes on. We have jobs that we were having some difficulty with some connections and we implemented some jobs in JAMS that monitor those connections throughout the day. This helped us identify issues faster than some of our vendors which we would have expected to be able to identify those issues. We were able to identify them even faster and actually warn us of issues before they made an impact.

Batch scheduling and having a single pane of glass that we can track the success of all of our automations throughout the day are the most valuable features. 

JAMS is very good at helping to handle common nuisances preventing our ops from running. We set up warnings whenever a job is having trouble, and that allows us to address it before it becomes business impacting. JAMS support has always been very helpful in providing us any guidance on how to address issues.

We use their interactive agents. We use agents on a few machines. We have some automations that will run the first part and then wait for a user to release or run a second part. That is used frequently and is very useful, but we don't have a ton of straight-up interaction. We do have some users that interact with JAMS, to release jobs or kickoff new jobs after they've done their checks.

Running interactive tasks helps our users focus on their business processes. Running tasks out of JAMS really helps us to do more with less and rerun as a fairly lean organization. That helps us to maintain that leanness so that we can do more with less. Since adopting JAMS, we have been able to actually reduce staff in areas and not replace them, just because of attrition. We didn't lay people off but we didn't have to hire replacements because JAMS processes were helping.

I think JAMS has a very good engine for being able to identify exceptions. We're probably not using it to its fullest extent, but I think it has pretty good capabilities as far as handling exceptions and if a job fails, how to react to it. 

The code driven automation for helping us handle complex scheduling requirements has been great. We have somewhat complex scheduling that we need to do based on business and holiday schedules and running it on a certain business day of the month and that kind of thing, and it has been no sweat. The support at JAMS has been very helpful in helping us to use that effectively.

We are still using JAMS 6.5, so I don't really feel comfortable talking about room for improvement as much because we're still using a little bit of the older version. My understanding is that the newer version has some additional capabilities. One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks.

It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries.

I have been using JAMS for almost seven years. 

It's been rock solid. We haven't had JAMS have issues that weren't introduced by other products. It's been rock solid and we depend on it as a mission-critical system.

We have the ability to scale out using more agents on other agent machines so that we could run more jobs simultaneously. I don't think scalability has ever been a problem honestly. I don't know that we really push JAMS all that hard. A bigger company would probably push JAMS a lot harder than we do, but scalability from our perspective has never been an issue.

We run hundreds of jobs a day. We don't have a ton of users of JAMS, but I would say that JAMS benefits almost the entire company in its automation.

JAMS support is as near to perfect as we can get, so I would rate them a nine out of ten. They are the best support that we deal with of any of our vendors.

They help to save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. They're great. They're responsive. They're always willing to jump in and help whenever they can. They're always very knowledgeable and engaging. We love JAMS' support. They've always been very good.

We used the Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler, but it wasn't anywhere near what JAMS is.

I had used Tidal before and I found JAMS more cost-effective and easier to use.

The bottom line for me in selecting JAMS was that it was cost-effective, it was not a hugely expensive product to purchase or maintain, and it did pretty much everything we needed it to do for what we were looking for. It has high capability and lower costs compared to its competitors, and that was the deciding factor for us.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have a relatively simple setup. So when we started out with JAMS, it was one JAMS server and we were running most of our jobs on that server. Then we grew with JAMS over the years and expanded it to other machines to run jobs because of the capabilities or the setups of those machines. That was all really pretty straightforward. If we ever ran into any questions or anything, JAMS support has been great.

We've been able to do more with less. In other words, we've either not had to increase staff in some cases, or when people left, we didn't replace them. We've been able to reduce staff. We didn't have layoffs, but when people left, we didn't replace them, and that was largely due to the automation efforts through JAMS.

If I had to do it all over again, I would probably use their professional services to kickstart things. We did a lot of self-training on JAMS, so we've learned a lot along the way, but if I had to do it over again, I would probably have used more of their training capabilities and maybe some of their professional services. My advice to anybody considering JAMS is to get started and because it really helps us a ton for that single pane of glass for managing automated processes.

I would rate JAMS a nine out of ten. 

Previously, all the jobs were on different platforms, so the monitoring was not centralized. That was the main challenge about two years ago. After implementing JAMS, especially in staging and production, we have one dashboard or console that we look at every day. It's easier to monitor jobs. It's efficient. We can easily track which jobs have failed. The administrator can work in a productive and proactive way. In one dashboard, we can navigate and see which jobs are running and which jobs have failed or have been successful. We also have direct email notifications. In terms of administration and monitoring, it really helps administrators to monitor 24/7 operations, and when it comes to the business, we give them the capability to monitor the jobs. They can monitor the jobs as well when they are executed in one place. They can navigate to the domain structures from different domains, and they can monitor their own servers every day.

We started with the custom dashboard just two weeks ago. It's easier for us to monitor through the custom dashboard. We're able to customize the dashboard for the things that we want to monitor.

When it comes to automation, we have already implemented a couple of scripts. For example, we have a daily agent check, so we created a PowerShell script to monitor that. Every day, that job executes and checks which jobs agents are offline or inaccessible, and it will then send an email notification to the administrator. We can then check the server status and identify why the server is offline or inaccessible. In terms of automation, we are able to work with the developers based on their requirements. We have already implemented different jobs. We have automated some of the API jobs. We have also automated the process of restarting application services.

We have different batch-processing jobs. Some of them are weekly, and some of them are monthly. We can proactively monitor all batch-processing jobs that are recurring on a weekly or monthly basis.

JAMS saves time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. When we have an issue, we check the logs and the execution history. We also have documentation of the common issues in Confluence. We did not encounter any major issues so far. We haven't had any fatal or severity one issues. They have mostly been basic issues. Most of the time, it was an execution issue. For example, we had a monthly patching activity that affected our servers at times. During patching, the server was rebooted, and the jobs that were running at that time got terminated. We had raised our concern with the JAMS team about the synchronization. When the server is rebooted or restarted, the expectation is that JAMS and the server will synchronize. We encountered this issue in the previous versions. When we upgraded the version, we did not encounter that anymore.

Using an enterprise system like JAMS to manage our jobs gives us peace of mind. In addition, we don't require many administrators for monitoring the jobs. In our current environment, there are only three of us at the moment. I'm working during the daytime, and the other two are working during the nighttime. Three of us are enough to monitor and manage JAMS. It's a time saver because you don't need to monitor it from time to time. It automatically manages everything.

The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc.

Its integration capabilities are also valuable. There is API, and then there is integration with Snowflake and Power BI. The PowerShell integration is also very powerful.

It has been good so far. We are very satisfied with JAMS' capabilities and features. When I joined the company, we migrated all the jobs from different environments, such as from SQL and Oracle databases, Cron jobs, and Windows task scheduler, to JAMS. We onboarded different departments to JAMS. The product and the business teams are very satisfied as well with how JAMS works. They especially like the self-service capability wherein they can provision or deploy their own jobs in lower environments. Developers are able to leverage different development processing jobs. They are building their own PowerShell scripts and are integrating with other applications through APIs.

The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions.

I've been using JAMS for about two years. 

From time to time, the JAMS team will update you about the latest release. So, in terms of stability, the JAMS team will support you in maintaining your system. We haven't had any issues with stability. We are very satisfied with that because when they release a new version, we are informed ahead of time. We appreciate that kind of engagement.

Its scalability seems good. We have a lot of users using it. We have 12 to 15 internal departments using it, and we have 300 to 400 users. The roles of its users vary from department to department. The most common roles are developers, QA, business analysts, and managers. In terms of maintenance, there are three of us who are managing JAMS.

Currently, in staging, we have around 500 jobs, and in production, we have close to 1,000 jobs. We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time. If the number of servers increases, we will plan ahead of time and increase its capacity. 

We encountered a few issues, but we didn't have any major issues so far. When we encountered an issue that wasn't familiar to us or that we couldn't resolve or troubleshoot, we created a ticket. They set up a meeting session with us. We collaborated and identified the issue and documented the issue so that if we encounter the same issue in the future, we have documentation about how to fix the issue.

I'd rate their customer service a nine out of ten. We don't have any issues. When you create a ticket, a good thing is that they respond immediately. Most of the time, I go to the JAMS portal to create and submit a ticket. There's chat support that will immediately respond to your inquiry. That's a good way to submit a ticket to JAMS support. They respond immediately via chat. They also ask you to provide the logs in case of any issues. For an in-depth investigation, they will also schedule a meeting so that they can have a working session to review the issue and resolve it as soon as possible.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously. As far as I know, my team was managing the jobs for each platform separately. We didn't have a central solution before. This is the first time that we have an enterprise platform like JAMS.

When I joined the company, the database engineering team had already started to deploy it. It was already set up.

Our setup is standalone at the moment. We have two environments. We have the staging environment. All of our platforms are deployed in staging, and then we have a separate box for production. There is a plan for high availability. This year, we are planning to include that option and implement it.

We have on-premises deployment, and we also have a private cloud. We have Azure, and we are also exploring AWS.

I do take care of the upgrades. The upgrade process is very simple. There is online documentation. The upgrade procedure is quite similar to other solutions.

Based on what I know, we only consulted our JAMS vendor. We did not go to a third-party consultant.

We would have got an ROI, but I'm not aware of the numbers. We are still using this product, so there must be an ROI.

It was already deployed when I joined this company.

We had two internal people who evaluated it and installed it in staging and production. They learned it on their own. When I joined the company, I didn't have any prior experience with JAMS, so they gave me training, and I learned from them. The main challenge was that while learning the platform and its functionalities, we were also doing onboarding. We were migrating different jobs to JAMS, and we encountered some issues. For example, while migrating the jobs, we had to disable them because there was another phase of the project for communicating with the product team and identifying the jobs that needed to be enabled and the jobs that weren't needed anymore. So, we encountered different challenges while importing the jobs, configuring the jobs, and assigning the access permissions, but from that experience, we learned a lot. Overall, it was a good experience.

I'd rate JAMS a 10 out of 10 for its features and capabilities. In terms of features, JAMS has almost all features. JAMS can meet the needs of most companies or organizations at the moment. We don't find any limitations.

We have a lot of automation between picking up files and pushing them to our dealer portal and to vendors in the cloud. We also use it so that vendors can place files in folders. In addition, we automatically email statements and inventory reports.

We have some jobs that run once a day at a certain time, but we have many jobs that are set to auto-run if a file shows up. When the time changes or a batch job on another server fails and we restart it, we don’t have to follow the job to the end. JAMS just grabs the file when it shows up and sends it. I love that.

We have over 50 jobs running daily to manage all the integration of our systems and we don’t have to monitor these jobs. They just run. In addition, JAMS centralizes the management of jobs in our environment and this has streamlined our monitoring.

The solution saves us about four hours a week in troubleshooting time and has helped free up about eight hours a week of IT staff time.

Among the most valuable features are

• the ability to define autorun jobs to pick up files and push them when they show up
• the scripting 
• PHP
• the timing.

All of these are perfect.

We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually.

Another useful feature is the solution’s ability to handle exceptions. If there are errors, we get notifications. 

The code-driven automation for handling complex scheduling works great. We have reports that come out and we have programs that will bust them and email them to our dealers by dealer number. JAMS helps with automation.

If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful. I would read the whole thing and learn as much as possible about the product.

I have been using JAMS since February of 2019.

It is very stable. The only time it stops is when the server is rebooted and then the services are restarted.

It is very scalable and we really use a lot of what JAMS offers.

Technical support has been very helpful and that was particularly true when I hired a new programmer.

We used Freebyte and we needed to move off of that product.

I didn’t do the initial setup, but I didn’t hear any complaints from my programmer about it.

Initially, it took a couple of weeks to get all the jobs set up. But we have added so many more because the software has so many great features. We didn't do a migration from our old solution, we just keyed in all the definitions.

We have two people using and maintaining JAMS, but you don’t need everyone in the company setting up automated jobs, just the programmers and integrators.

This is a good product at a fair price. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an annual maintenance cost.

We looked at other options, but this was the best.

Consider how much integration and automation you require. This product is very robust.

Overall, the product is excellent.

We started with basic tasks because we were bringing things over from Windows Task Scheduler. We didn't have a whole lot of dependencies at that point. We have gotten much more detailed in our scheduling requirements since. We use what are currently called JAMS Setups, which in the new version are called Sequence Jobs, quite a bit, especially for our enterprise data analytics team. We do some pretty complex scheduling scenarios.

We also use it for holiday calendars that impact our scheduling and for multiple regular scenarios, such as dependencies on a file or another job or another Setup. 

Overall, we use it for basic, normal enterprise-scheduling solutions.

We've been able to automate a lot of processes that were done manually before. We're not a huge company, and we're a fairly new company, so a lot of things were being done before in Task Scheduler or in a homegrown solution called Batch Nucleus. They were also in cron and in SaaS. They were all over the place. Being able to consolidate all of that into this one enterprise scheduling solution allows us to put dependencies on different jobs between different systems. It also allows us to monitor everything from one place and gives us the ability to do some exception handling. We have unlimited licensing with JAMS and we have hundreds of environments that we have agents on and do testing on. Having one location that we can monitor everything from, and handle all the exceptions from, is critical.

We've automated our critical processes, which used to be done manually through an external product and that means we don't have to worry quite so much about manual, human error.

Because we have gone from a lot of manual processes to automated processes with JAMS, we have been able to free up IT staff time. We're not spending 30 minutes doing something manually that JAMS can do in five minutes. It has freed up IT resources, but it has also sped up our processing times. For just the Technical Operations Center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week.

JAMS has also helped eliminate “data slack” across our applications. All of our enterprise data analytics is done through JAMS, so being able to access things like Teradata, Hadoop, and Snowflake cloud solutions for data integration is important. Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data. It's been a good tool for that. Having current data ready to go when our users need it is extremely critical because we are a FinTech company. We have to be able to pull data instantaneously to make decisions. Otherwise, our customer base is reduced and there are also compliance issues. We have both financial and legal obligations to our partner companies, so that data has to be up-to-date and ready to go when they request it.

I've used a lot of the other scheduling packages in the past. The most valuable feature of JAMS is the ease of being able to update parameters on-the-fly. Also, their monitoring and historical views are pretty robust.

We are also able to go into a job that is inside of a Setup and say, "Turn this one off for a while," by using the Except clause.

Another useful functionality is being able to pass parameters and variables between different jobs, and different steps in a job, or a Setup.

JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them. I'd also like to be able to do different things, based on what the actual exception is. In our current version, there's a placeholder where you should be able to do some things along those lines, but we've never actually been able to get it to work. I've seen in the 7.x versions that that has been fixed.

In terms of automation, there are some scenarios that we're still working on trying to automate and we just haven't been able to find an applicable solution through JAMS for those yet. I'm excited to see, once we get to that point, if we can do those things in the newer version.

I started using JAMS in June of 2016. I was in charge of taking all of our disparate scheduling systems and converting everything into the JAMS scheduling package. I have used it from the ground up.

Right now we're on-prem, but we are going to want to go to the cloud sometime next year.

In the five years that I have worked on JAMS, I have never had it crash.

The fat client on your machine, for the 6.5 version, is not really reliable. It can slow down and it can get hung and you have to restart it. But with JAMS itself, the only issues we've had were when we didn't get the license key updated on time. For the most part, JAMS has been a very steady, reliable tool.

Because we have unlimited licensing, it has been extremely scalable for us. We can put agents on whatever servers and environments that we need to, fairly quickly and easily. We now have that set up as an automated process. So it's extremely scalable, based on the pricing model and how many agents you're allowed.

Technical support is an area in which JAMS has come a long way. When I first started with them, they didn't have any kind of training. The way it worked was that if we had a question, we would call their support team and there might be some back-and-forth trying to figure out how to get what we needed. But they now have JAMS University where you can go to a boot camp and learn more about the product. 

And their support is pretty good and pretty responsive. They get back to you fairly quickly and they usually have a good solution to whatever your issue is. And while they have generally been responsive, there have been several times when getting an answer has taken several weeks, instead of being able to get a really quick answer. I would rate JAMS support at seven out of 10, but I wouldn't give more than an eight for the support for any product that I've worked with. That makes a seven a high mark, for me.

Neutral

We spun off from another company, and that other company used Control-M. When we went our own way, we didn't bring Control-M with us. The scheduling solutions that we were using before were Task Scheduler, a homegrown solution, and SQL Server Agent jobs, things that aren't necessarily true enterprise scheduling solutions.

In our migration to JAMS, we had to refactor some of the code, but that's because of the way that it was coded before. SQL Server Agent and Task Scheduler were pretty easy to migrate because there is actually a conversion routine where you can log in to a machine from JAMS and just say, "Go pull the job and convert it." It would automatically convert it, and we would just have to do some cleanup. That part was easy. But when it came to some of our other stuff, we pretty much had to build it from scratch.

I was the only person working on the migration back then, so it took about a year and a half to get everything over, but a lot of that was because we were having to go find things that were being scheduled on these other boxes. Some 80 percent of it was done within the first four to six months.

JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used.

I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want. That has been a godsend for us because we have environments that we spin up and take down on-demand. There are times when we have hundreds of environments going at one time. Having that lower-cost model has been really good for us, while still being able to get the functionality that we need from the tool.

Maintenance and additional features are all included in the yearly cost, and that cost is still much cheaper than what you would pay for maintenance for another product.

The one that I had used most recently, and the longest, was BMC Control-M. It is an extremely robust product that has the ability to do some things that our current version of JAMS cannot do. For example, Control-M has the ability to truly diagram out what the flow looks like, from within the tool. My understanding, after having talked to my scheduling analyst, is that that feature is coming up in a future version of JAMS, which is cool.

Control-M also has the ability to do batch impact analysis, and to put a job at the end of a job flow that says that if anything in the job flow breaks, provide an alert. JAMS has the functionality to do that in the current version, but you have to code it. If you want to say, "If this job fails, I want this other job to run to fix it, and then come back and do this other job," you have to code it. But I believe, again, in the newer versions, it's easier to do that type of flow by using Sequence Jobs. That's the biggest area where I felt JAMS really needed to improve, in automatically handling issues, and they've come a long way.

Control-M enables you to send different types of notifications based on the output, which is also a feature that's coming up in the 7.0 version of JAMS.

JAMS has taken quite a few of the recommendations that we gave them and has built them into their newer versions of JAMS. It has been an exciting journey for us to be able to have a lot of input into how the product works.

I'm really excited that we're trying to upgrade to the 7.x version, because it's so much better. But it's a huge change to go from the 6.0 version to the 7.0 version. The tool looks completely different. It works differently, with different ways to do things, so there is a big learning curve. Since our developers build their own jobs in the lower-level environments, it's going to be a big learning curve for our entire company to start using the most current version.

We've defined our complex scheduling scenarios the way that JAMS works in our current version, but in the future version that's going to be much easier. That version has the ability to create multiple schedules on the same job, instead of having multiple jobs with different schedules doing the same thing.

In terms of the upgrade process, we have multiple instances, including development, stage, and production. We've been trying to build a test environment and we have been doing a lot of our tests there. For our actual cut-over and conversion to the newest version, we are being told that we can actually upgrade in-place, instead of having to do a conversion of our database. We're going to take a two- to three-week freeze on any scheduling updates and on adding anything new. Then we'll convert our development instance and train all of our developers on how to use it and what the differences are. We'll let them test. Then we'll upgrade our stage environment and let them test on that. As soon as all of that looks good, we'll do an upgrade of our production system.

We will be working with HelpSystems on the upgrade when we get a little bit closer to it. At this point we're still trying to figure out exactly when we're going to be able to do it. But we have asked them multiple questions and gotten a lot of good feedback from them.

In terms of saving time when troubleshooting stalled jobs, JAMS could do that. But we don't have all of our code set to send the output from a job back to JAMS. So in a lot of instances, we're still having to dig into the system, like Informatica, to get that log back and find out what's wrong. That is something that we, as a company, need to improve. It's not a lack of functionality on the part of JAMS.

We have many batch jobs. JAMS really helps us schedule all the jobs and execute them one by one, or sometimes in parallel, on a daily basis.

We have two schedulers, a primary and a secondary, and we also have a few agent servers. All the jobs are scheduled on them to run.

JAMS helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. Also, in the past, we tried different schedulers. We used to have agent jobs on SQL Server, and we used Windows Task Scheduler, but now we have just one tool. For troubleshooting and maintainability, I don't need to go to different places to find the answer. I just go to JAMS.

The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option.

I can also set up a workflow that repeats, which is quite good. And if there's something wrong, it will send an email notification so that we can look into it.

Most of the jobs are very critical to our internal business operations. On one hand, they need to be executed, and on the other, they need to be completed within a certain timeframe. JAMS helps split jobs out to our different agents to complete. That's really helpful.

The solution is good, it's reliable. But sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain.

I've been using JAMS for about three years.

In general, it's quite stable. I don't need to worry about it 99 percent of the time. And because we have an HA setup, it's quite reliable. 

The scalability is good. If I have, say, two agents at the moment but I think that's not enough, I can just purchase more licenses and it will support more agents. We currently have six agents.

When I have an issue that I don't know how to fix, I just send an email to them. They are very responsive and knowledgeable. They always fix the problem for me.

Positive

Before using JAMS we used Windows Task Scheduler, but it's not a high-availability setup. If that server is down, jobs won't get executed. With JAMS in place, if the primary scheduler is down, the secondary will pick up all the scheduling responsibility, so we don't need to worry. Even if it is an agent, the job will be executed on other agents.

We had a consultant onsite to help us set up, so it was okay. We migrated jobs from Windows Task Scheduler, or agent jobs, to JAMS. It was not time-consuming, but because we have a lot of jobs it's not like the migration happened within 30 minutes. It took some time, but the process was simple and straightforward.

There is a bit of a learning curve to JAMS. It's not like you install it and it will be up and running for you. You need to learn to use it properly. Otherwise, you may run into issues. We engaged a JAMS consultant who gave us some training. It was expensive, but it was quite useful.

It's expensive, it's not free, but it takes care of my concerns. That is a form of ROI.

It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job.

I haven't used another scheduler in several years, but compared to the one I last used, JAMS is better. It's more reliable, and that is actually the most important thing.

JAMS' ability to handle exceptions is not the best, but it's good. Don't expect any tool to be perfect. You need to make sure your internal program works together with JAMS to deliver the best solution.

What my team needs are tools to reliably execute all the jobs, minimize the risks, and support high-availability. JAMS does the job.

The initial use case is that we use it to centralize everything, including all jobs from across different environments. Our goal is to be able to do all of the maintenance centrally.

When our jobs run, our team handles the jobs and they are not assigned to other teams. The output, which is on the backend and put into the database, is available for everyone.

JAMS helps us to deal with the small issues that come up here and there because we implement notifications for jobs. Whenever a job fails, it sends a notification and most of the time, there is a setting in the configuration that has to be changed. We have JAMS configured in a data-driven setup.

Whenever a job runs, it reads the configuration settings that are specific to it. If ever there is an issue, it's typically because we have the wrong configuration. In cases like this, we tweak the configuration and then somebody runs the job again by right-clicking on it.

We have JAMS set up so that we are running two interactive agents. One is a scheduler and the other is exclusive for SSIS execution. These are important to us and without them, it's going to negatively affect the business.

The way that we implemented and use JAMS is in a centralized configuration. We don't have people running jobs on their desktop because it would mean that we don't have visibility of it. Instead, everything has been migrated to JAMS so that it can run centrally. If anybody needs to run a job or perform any execution, especially for production, they can do so in JAMS. Later, we can look and see who ran what jobs at what times, and if ever there is a modification then we will know who modified it.

JAMS is able to handle exceptions in different ways. The way that we have it configured is to notify us. The process may be retried several times and we can set the limit for this. We also configure what the delay is between retries. It will depend on the use case and how long it takes. However, if it fails then it has to notify another group so that they can take a look at what the exception was.

We have a job that is similar to a report subscription, and this is done for each of our 50 partners. Prior to JAMS, we were required to run 50 different jobs. As it is now, given that JAMS is data-driven, we have only created a single job. It is written as a workflow with those configuration items. We don't need to change the job or add to it. Instead, it reads the configuration table and runs the 50 processes right away.

If there is a process that needs to be disabled then we do so in the configuration table, and the workflow picks up the changes. Having a single job taking care of the 50 processes makes the system more flexible.

JAMS helps free up time for our IT staff because it's centralized and the logging is there. The time that IT spends troubleshooting a job has been significantly reduced. The amount of time it saves varies on a case-by-case basis. For a more complex job, it can save more time. If we consider SSIS, it has its own logging capabilities but it requires that somebody with the right permissions go in and open the logs. Not everybody has permission for that, so the job depends on perhaps a single person. Often, that person has several responsibilities and other things to do, so the task can take longer to complete. JAMS collects all of the relevant logs, and having them centralized means that several people can view them, rather than only those with that application-specific set of permissions. This is one of the reasons that it saves us time.

The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly.

We test the disaster recovery capability every now and then because it is important for us to be able to failover to another site. As long as that works, if we have a problem then it's business as usual. A problem doesn't impede our work because there's no interruption in the service.

Writing the JAMS schedule is nice because we can use natural language in English. For example, we can specify days by writing "the first of March" or "the second of March". It's clear. Being able to specify the schedule in this way is good.

JAMS saves us time when it comes to troubleshooting stalled jobs because of the logging that it provides. It allows us to go to the execution history, look at the log, and find the problem. Even if the log is very large, it provides a path for us to follow and find what we need to look at. We can typically solve issues in an hour or less because of the logging.

The PowerShell integration is great. When there are things that we couldn't do out of the box, they have execution methods that we can use in PowerShell that make things more flexible for us.

The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do. We have to know where it is. This is really the functionality that I think is lacking.

We have been using JAMS for approximately three years.

JAMS is a pretty stable solution that handles the resources very well. 

This product is highly scalable.

We have two people on the administration side and another ten people who are working with it. They are using it as part of their support role with the helpdesk. We also have a developer that creates the jobs, which are then scheduled by JAMS.

We will probably increase our usage in the future. Right now, we're implementing the web client of JAMS. When we get to the point that we are fully using it, including the web component, then that may be the time for us to look into expanding our usage. At this point, we want to be able to maximize the use of JAMS, and so far, it seems that there's a lot to JAMS that we haven't really used yet.

I would rate the support very high.

First, the response time is very good. When we engage the support engineers, they always know what to provide us with so that we can figure out what's wrong. Whenever we need to go to meetings, it's always a learning experience. They're very smart.

JAMS did not replace other monitoring tools and it was able to solve the problem that we had.

I was not the person that initially set up JAMS. It's not complex but that person didn't follow the procedure fully. When I took over the implementation and setup, JAMS provided a checklist. It was good because I was able to follow each of the steps. From what I can tell, in the initial setup, we didn't follow it to a tee, and this caused some complexity on our end.

The deployment took about a year in total, although in a typical situation, I think that two weeks would be enough time to implement it. Depending on how much work needs to be done, it may take a month to complete.

In our team, we have a two-week scrum process and it would be quicker for us to do. Our security and infrastructure are also different than it is in the rest of the organization. For example, we can set up our own VM, database, and scheduler if they are not already set up.

JAMS provides a list of the best practices with regard to security. 

We have two people in-house that are responsible for maintenance.

There are a lot of features in JAMS that we haven't used yet. For example, there is a special calendar and we haven't even tried to utilize it. However, we would like to eventually use it to its full potential.

In summary, this product is top class. I would like to commend all of the engineers and support team at JAMS, and I highly recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.